Tarot Sour (11 page)

I wonder, if the driver of that car had held his fingers up to his face he might have seen me floating here in space with the angels promenading about me. One of them lands on my arm and I watch it blink and crawl. There comes a sour sting before it peels back its onion-skin wings and alights again. I had never thought that fireflies could bite, but the tiny welt like being branded by the tip of a needle shows how little sense it would have made for them not to. I think, everything has teeth in some form. Behind me, the kitchen light flicks on through the windows. I straighten up and hold my back against the back of the bench, I squeeze myself into the pores of the shadows, I will myself to become molecular and vaporize. I hold my breath. If the porch light comes on I will have to explain why I am awake at three in the morning. I want it to be my mother so she can tell me not to go, and so I can tell her that I don't want to go, but I am going to go anyway. These things are always easier to say in the dark when you don't have to see the face of those you tell them to. I silently curse the firefly that flies past and lights up my face to betray my position. It is just another form of tooth. The kitchen light shuts off a moment later. Probably just Ingot, up for a glass of water or a piss. I close my eyes and feel the fog fill my sinuses, make my head light and my body that much more contrastingly heavy. And then I fall asleep here, nestled warmly amidst a nest of angels, just meters away tonight, thank God. When I wake up the next morning, I know that I have seen my last midnight at home.

Here, in the morning dusk horizons away from that old porch, I can't see much more than outlines, contours, and shadows blending into each other and pulling apart again. The orange line on the horizon has grown, and the black sky has become a muted, de-saturated blue. A figure approaches me. It is a tall, stalwart, wide-shouldered body whose hands are folded neatly behind its back. “Emery Fasch?” it asks.

“Yeah,” I answer. I am uninterested in this person in front of me, I am surveying my surroundings, waiting for the dusk to infiltrate my eyes so that I can begin planning my journey back home. They do, and when they do I see a long line of stiff-standing men in the sand down by the train station, dressed in light gray slacks and stiff-buttoned cloud-blue jackets. They stand with their arms at their sides and their chins in the air. I finally look at the man in front of me, towering over me, an obelisk casting a shadow over all that is his, which at this moment, is me.

“I think you can do a little better addressing me than that, son.”

“Yes, sir,” I say, kicking my feet together beneath me and straightening my back. Everything about me becomes statue-like.

“Welcome to the coast, son. I'm General Anselmo.”

Behind me, someone steps off of the train. I feel the vibration of the booted feet hit the sand. The doors of the train swish closed behind me. The woman who had sat across from me steps around, pauses briefly to nod at the General before sliding a tight black cloth hood over her head, and then continues to the line of recruits waiting for instruction. I look behind me, but the train is already gone.

* * *

“Hey Stalls, get your ass out here already!” The shadows of hands flutters over the canvas of my tent like sparrows and then they alight. Pecker's head appears in the front flap, “Ja-Ja and Robinson are back. It's time, pus. Wake up.” I sit up. My first thought is, where is the train? I dig the meaty parts of my thumbs into my eyes until I see two thick black stars. I pull on my uniform jacket, button it as I lurch out from my tent and feel to be growing as I stand up straight and erect my back. Ja-Ja is a fair-haired Swede with a penchant for slipping into his native tongue at random moments. Robinson is stout, short, one would hardly peg him as a soldier, with greasy dark hair that hangs over his face and leaves strands of acne in its wake like the lashes left behind by a smoldering flay. They are sitting around the fire, which Tens is tending as though he revived it, though I suspect it must have been Peck who'd done so.

“Come here,” Robinson says, waving me over. He is holding a long suede wine skin, doling out portions of beverage to the others who hold small plastic cups. I reach into my tent and pluck my own cup out of my bag before taking my place on the logs.

“What is it?” I ask as the transparent red fluid fills a generous portion of my cup.

“Tarot sour, the General's recipe,” Robinson answers. “He's got a cauldron of it bubbling back at the Cannery. Told me to bring some out here for us. Inflate the backbone.”

Peck downs his and has Robinson refill it. Then he lifts it to the canopy and says, “Tarot sour, here's to the unluckiest sons of bitches the stars ever frowned upon. Raise glass, boys. Today you make men.”

Peck has been here for a dozen years already. The General had no reluctance in charging him with the four of us when he sends us out here to the coast yesterday morning. Ja-Ja and Tens have been here for a couple of years but have never seen battle. Ja-Ja is a computer tech who has been working backstage at the Cannery since he'd arrived and Tens was administrative until he'd requested a change, the reason for which nobody can quite tell seeing how he consistently ensures that he is too injured to perform any duty asked of him. Robinson was recruited at the same time as me. I don't know why the General had assigned me to go to the beach with only two weeks of training behind me, especially with a group of seasoned vets, except that the General claims he sees special potential in me. Robinson wasn't originally assigned to come with us, but the man who was supposed to be our fifth had to be admitted for an emergency appendectomy, and with everyone else who would have been suitable already assigned to other strands of beach among other missions, the General chose another new recruit somewhat randomly to take the extra place.

One at a time, like solemn dominoes, we place our cups on the grass and stand. Our rifles all lean against trees. We go to them and begin the waltz. Take its hand, a gentle two-step spin, lift, lower its strap like an arm around your shoulder, bow and slide the barrel beneath your arm. Tens wishes us luck and pokes the fire. The four of us begin our march, out of camp, toward the tree line where the beach waits.

We stand with the toes of our boots testing the sand for a long time. The little black spots that lined the distant waves earlier are gone, and now the hot reflection of the sun on the sand is broken with their black backs. It is a legion of sea tortoises, some larger than any of us, sifting their fat flippers through the sand to lay their eggs. “We provide a noble service here!” the General had proclaimed that first night shortly after my arrival. The slithering metallic labyrinth of pipes and cylinders that forms his Cannery shines like a temple in the sunrise, atop the low cliff behind him. “But there are those who would shut us down! There are forces in this world that would
gladly
see what little there is left in it, annihilated. It is
our
job to make sure they do
not
succeed, by whatever means
necessary
!”

We sink out of the forest like clouds, and stand for a longer moment. The tortoises swarm the sands as far down the beach as we can see. Reverend Wiley had told us that demons possess the beach, demons that will render the General's Cannery useless by devouring the sea life before it can be netted into the slaughtering machinery. With the slow stop-motion movement of their paddles, the ferocity of red burning in their ringless eyes and the monstrous snapping of the tapered jaws, I momentarily believe in demons. One of the tortoises down the beach lifts its head into the air and lets out a bellow like a sea lion. A smaller female next to it begins burrowing into the sand so that it can dispel its sac of eggs. Sense regains me and I know again that everything the Reverend says is just a tactic to build devotion in his new recruits. We aren't holy soldiers fighting a religious war, we are men who have given up all other opportunity so that we can work low-wage, potentially dangerous manual labor for, in my case, a minimum five-year agreement. We are economy.

There is a wooden crack and we all wince, all close our eyes. For a moment I am not sure if I am alive or dead. Ironically, it is a very liberating feeling. My eyes open again just in time to see Robinson's body slump to the ground. His head has evaporated, become a bloody stump of ribbons. The three of us drop to a knee and hold ourselves close to the ground. Peck raises his rifle and begins circling his own footprints in narrow circles on his knees, one eye trained on the sight of his gun. They warned us about the animal rights activists who sometimes hide in the woods, sometimes in the sea with only the muzzle of a shotgun and a hollow reed through which they can breathe above the angry surface. I hold onto the barrel of my own weapon though my fingers are miles from the trigger. I hold it to my chest for comfort, the way I had once held onto my mother's legs. At my feet is the lifeless body of Robinson. His real name hadn't been Robinson, it had been Phillip Carrusoe. Peck had given him the name Robinson because he thought his last name had been Crusoe.

“I think it's okay,” Pecker says. We stand cautiously and lower our rifles. Ja-Ja uses his thumb to cross himself, then he turns away from Robinson forever. The pool of blood draining from the shredded throat is soaking down into the sand where it leaves a grainy stain.

“What the
fuck
was
that
?” Tens screams from the woods.

“Shut up, Tens,” Pecker says, though not nearly loudly enough for Tens to hear. He is looking at Robinson's body. “Alright let's get this over with.”

From our jackets we take our carving knives, long serrated things better suited for butchers than soldiers. Yet here we are. We slaughter the tortoises. Those that have already lain their eggs, we destroy the eggs as well. Pecker suffers a nasty bite to the calf but it's inconsequential. Ja-Ja loses a finger trying to pry off the shell of one of the bulls he thinks is dead. Peck and I help tourniquet the bleeding and then we go off down the beach to finish our job.

I head south along the beach, skewering the smaller or slower tortoises with the knife and shooting the more trying ones with the rifle. I reach the end of the beach, a tall open-mouthed cave, and then head back north to find the others. I find Peck standing on the coastline with the slow tide washing up over his boots, soaking the cuffs of his pants with blood and salt. He is holding the blackened knife by its hilt, carelessly at his side. His gun is dug into the wet sand. There is a pile of bleeding tortoises around him. He is staring at the low island off in the distance, the island the tortoises come from, supposedly. I approach slowly. He looks over at me and tries to smile but goddamn does he look sad. I shunt my gun into the sand next to his and then I sit down and let the water rise up and chill my ass.

“So why are you here, Stalls?”

I look out over the water. The sun is beginning to set. The water is a coalition of collapsed rainbows. If the world were a rainbow, I would bet that the ruins after the descent of civilization would look like an ocean at sunset. I don't answer him.

“You know I've been here for just over a dozen years,” he tells me. “When I left home, it didn't look the way it does now. The forest, that forest,” he nods his head back at the woods that separates us from home, “it was grown out, into the town, into the desert. It wasn't a desert back then. The trees grew between the homes, lined the streets, there was dirt instead of sand. Grass, flowers, instead of nothing as there is now. It was a beautiful place. Lush. I remember I was just younger than you, maybe fifteen, when the apparition appeared in the bell tower at the center of town. It showed up without warning. We could all see it there, the shimmer moving around the defunct rusted iron curve of the bell of the town hall. We could all see it there, clearly through the wide, flat frilled leaves of the cacao palms, whether midday or deep night. It was always there and we all saw it, but none of us would acknowledge it to each other. We watched it secretly, peripherally, when nobody was watching
us
.

“At first we grew nervous for what it portended. Was it a doomsday angel? The spirit of a town founder come to share a warning? Then we grew quiet, realizing that it was a private ghost, meant for one, not for all. Walking the streets you could see everyone glancing above their newspapers, over their own and each other's shoulders, up at the bell tower. We grew quiet. Guilt spread for the sins we had all committed against the dead. Then, paranoia spread, sins again, but for the ones that hadn't yet been found out. Still, we could say nothing, not until we knew, was the apparition here for me? For her, or him, or them?

“Everyone seemed concerned with it except for my father, who remained disinterested in the specter and remained as stoic as he always was. Finally, on the third night, we were woken by the tolling of the bell. It hadn't sung in fourteen years, since they'd installed the citywide public announcement speakers. I threw on my clothes and I joined the rest of the town outside where we listened to it toll slowly, heavily. Eleven strokes to mark the time. We were finally all looking directly at it, you could see the upturned faces in the pall of the lanterns and flashlights some of the people thought to carry out with them. They could look because now they knew, it wasn't for them. You could see the relief and satisfaction transform their faces like a magnetic wave sweeping the town as one by one they applied the numbers to all the dead they knew and realized the ghost hadn't come for them.”

He pauses and takes in a deep breath. I am about to ask him why he is telling me all of this when he continues.

“Except for me, Stalls. I slunk back into the house thinking of my mother who had given birth to me at eleven o'clock even, the third night after going into labor. She died shortly after I took my first breaths. So I sat sweating by the window until the last oil lantern had shut off and the only light left was the blue shifting shimmer of my mother at the top of that tower. I made my way silently to it, wondering how many people were watching from their darkened houses to see who would go. Watching
me
. I found the doorway, broke the latch with a stone, and ascended the winding staircase. When I got up there, I saw her, standing placidly at the edge of the platform, staring south, over the woods. I stood by her side for a moment and looked with her. I could just make out the form of the Cannery. I thought I heard her whisper,
‘Please
,' but when I turned to look at her, the apparition was gone. That's why I'm here, Stalls, because my mother asked me to come.”